SDG 7: Affordable and Clean Energy

Ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all.

Community curated research on ScienceOpen. Keyword SDG 7

SDG 7: Affordable and Clean Energy

If your research contributes to meeting the UN Sustainable Development Goal 7: Affordable and Clean Energy add the keyword "SDG 7", "SDG7: Affordable and Clean Energy" and/or "Sustainable Development Goals" to your article/book/chapter/conference paper/ dataset and we will automatically add it to this rapidly growing collection of research outputs. See the instructions here


The world is making good progress on increasing access to electricity and improving energy efficiency. However, millions of people throughout the world still lack such access, and progress on facilitating access to clean cooking fuels and technologies is too slow. The pandemic has highlighted the need for reliable and affordable electricity in health centres. In addition, a survey conducted in selected developing countries revealed that one quarter of the health facilities surveyed were not electrified, and another quarter had unscheduled outages, affecting their capacity to deliver essential health services. Such deficiencies weaken the health system’s response to the current health crisis.

The global electrification rate rose, from 83 per cent in 2010 to 90 per cent by 2018. Latin America and the Caribbean and Eastern and South-Eastern Asia maintained strong progress, exceeding 98 per cent access to electricity by 2018. However, the world’s deficit was increasingly concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa, where some 548 million persons, or 53 per cent of the population, lacked access to electricity.

Access to clean cooking fuels and technologies increased to 63 per cent in 2018, from 60 per cent in 2015 and 56 per cent in 2010. Still, 2.8 billion persons lacked such access and relied primarily on inefficient and polluting cooking systems. Because of the stagnant rate and rapid population growth, in sub-Saharan Africa, the number of people without access to clean fuels for cooking increased.

The renewable energy share of total final energy consumption gradually increased, from 16.3 per cent in 2010 to 17.0 per cent in 2015 and 17.3 per cent in 2017. Much faster growth is required to meet long-term climate goals.

Global primary energy intensity (the energy used per unit of GDP) improved by 2.2 per cent annually, from 5.2 per cent in 2015 to 5.0 per cent in 2017, but was still short of the 2.7 per cent annual rate needed to reach target 7.3.

International financial flows to developing countries in support of clean and renewable energy reached $21.4 billion in 2017, 13 per cent higher than in 2016 and a twofold increase from flows committed in 2010. Hydropower projects received 46 per cent of 2017 flows, while solar projects received 19 per cent, wind 7 per cent and geothermal 6 per cent.

Source: Progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals, Report of the Secretary-General, https://undocs.org/en/E/2020/57

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If your research contributes to meeting the UN Sustainable Development Goal 7: Affordable and Clean Energy add the keyword "SDG 7", "SDG7: Affordable and Clean Energy" and/or "Sustainable Development Goals" to your article/book/chapter/conference paper/ dataset and we will automatically add it to this rapidly growing collection of research outputs. See the instructions here: 

To raise awareness for this important research, the UN Sustainable Development Goals on ScienceOpen collection is promoted throughout the discovery environment in search menus, as "Related collection" banners and article recommendations. If you are working on a particular SDG you can add your work to the collection in 4 easy steps:

  1. Register on ScienceOpen at https://www.scienceopen.com/register.
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  4. Add the relevant SDG(s) to the keyword section, for example "SDG 1" or "SDG1: No poverty" and/or "Sustainable Development Goals" and then hit save! Your article will now be automatically added to the relevant collection within 24 hours. You can also add a lay summary, catchy image, disciplines and data availability statements to your work to increase its visibility.

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